The present invention relates generally to a system and method for designing web page display software, and a system for automating the displaying of data to end users over Internets and Intranets. More particularly, the invention relates to a system and method for designing survey results display software, and a method and system for displaying, to a user, customer satisfaction survey information that enables a product or service provider to evaluate the quality of goods and/or services received based on ratings and reports obtained by performing surveys of customers, employees, and/or staff.
Conventional approaches for surveying consumers of products and services, such as health care services, generally use standard survey forms or questionnaires, whereby an agent calls or visits a survey participant and performs the survey. Alternatively, the participant may be mailed a survey form for completion. Traditionally, the data from such surveys are compiled into large books of cross-tabulations (“banner books”) or are analyzed by special-purpose computer programs.
However, these methods of analyzing surveys and displaying their results are inefficient and untimely. Books of cross-tabulation are heavy and consume much paper, and finding a desired table requires considerable effort. The displays are usually numerical, and thus difficult for many readers to comprehend. Custom analyses require trained staff, who usually have a masters or doctorate degree. The production of banner books or custom analyses is a discrete task, which may be time-consuming and expensive.
It would be advantageous to automate the data display process to reduce the number of human beings utilized in the survey process, to reduce the costs, improve the efficiencies, and overcome the shortcomings of current techniques identified above. Modern computer and networking technologies provide potential solutions to these problems. It would also be useful to automate the process of designing the display of survey information, so that programmers with minimal programming experience can design useful and informative display charts, graphs, and reports with less effort and greater consistency than is typically found in programming environments today.
A software design system and method organized to limit the necessity of using experienced programmers to only those situations where advanced skills are necessary, thus reducing the cost of developing software by reducing the number of more experienced programmers, would be advantageous. Accordingly, it would be useful to separate tasks such that those that require less skill to implement are identified, because those tasks can utilize programmers with lower skill levels, and thus reduce labor costs. Further, a standardized format of the various software modules/components could ensure that the tasks can be completed efficiently and competently according to precise specifications. This standardization is able to increase the efficiency of the programmers similar to the way an assembly line increases the efficiency of a mechanical assembly operation, further reducing costs while simultaneously increasing the quality of the product because standardization allows for precise quality control.
Currently, there exist web servers, JAVA servlet engines, database engines that are standard commercial products that can be used for designing the required programs, and computer graphics libraries. However, the commercially available products would require much custom programming, and are typically larger and more complicated than necessary, and so they take longer to transmit and initialize than necessary. Further, developing custom applets would allow greater control over the appearance of the output displays. Writing servlets based on HTML pages similar to the Java Server Pages (JSP) development system would be useful. However, JSP is typically not capable of a separable design process using a programming team or HTML visual design tools, nor is it typically used with macro substitution. The JSP design process is typically substantially more complicated than the design process described herein (the SParser design process). Thus, new methods are necessary.
Improvements could be partially accomplished with available commercial products. The best of the alternatives would be application generators for databases, such as the IBM Informix Red Brick® Warehouse. The Survey Processing System Implementation differs from this type of product in focus and efficiency. An implementation that uses an Internet-based analysis system with tools for manipulating databases is needed, whereas competing products are just tools for making database queries. The difference is evident at both levels. At the user level, it would be useful to have an implementation that integrates data with a detailed description and classification of the data to guide the analysis path, whereas the users of commercial database products are left to understand on their own what the data pertain to and how they fit together.
At the system design level, a more flexible and efficient system than currently available would be useful. Existing systems such as Red Brick are capable of producing simple displays such as bar charts, for example, but they typically cannot produce control charts within the boundaries of Red Brick@, nor could they produce anything comparable to cross-concept integrated displays. Components that are enabled for interaction (e.g. the user can click on parts of the display to show extra information) would be beneficial, but the graphics in the Red Brick® system are not interactive. Database companies normally provide general application programming tools that permit basic access through server programming languages such as PERL or JAVA. The Survey Processing System Implementation provides the system developer with SParser tools that are written in Java.
An even less satisfactory alternative would be to design a system based on a combination of Microsoft® products, such as FrontPage® and Visual Basic® Script, or the newer “.net” platform of tools. This type of system does not incorporate the generality of the HTML templates based on the SParser-enabled macro programming, nor does it allow a sequenced development strategy. Indeed, the resulting systems are orders of magnitude more complicated yet less functional.
The previous state of the art of survey results display is inadequate for a real-time survey analysis program to be used for the purpose of quality improvement by medical personnel and their executives. Existing data analysis tools are not sufficiently embedded in the context of a survey—the content of the survey and the responses, the hierarchical relationships between survey questions, the relationships between survey questions and external data, and typically cannot incorporate multimedia such as the actual voice of the respondent. Existing survey analysis tools (such as the SAS product) are command-driven, not interactive, and are too complicated for the intended consumers of survey, who are not professional analysts. Further, these tools are not adequate for presenting information in a way the user, often uneducated in statistical analysis, can easily interpret.
Although web-based graphical display tools exist, they are often so complicated that they work slowly, if at all, on many users' browsers, and they are very difficult to program—relying on explicit system programming of all database access and relying on skilled programmers often in short supply. Almost all of the statistical graphics available on the web are prepackaged images—inflexible and not interactive. It would be useful to provide a software development environment and tools that mitigate some of the difficulties of programming complex statistical images in a web-based environment. This environment would utilize a set of procedures and development tools to facilitate the programming of statistical display software and report generators into a library of standard forms and programs. Further, it would also be useful to provide a platform that utilizes these standard forms and programs to generate the desired output utilizing a web-based networking system, allowing remote data transfer and retrieval, formatting the information in a manner useful to end users in implementing a quality improvement process.